The string of economic crises over the past two years in Asia, Russia and Brazil pushed the IMF into the spotlight and provoked waves of criticism, not simply from angry workers and students in the streets of some crisis countries but also from high-powered economists — like Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard and Paul Krugman at MIT — think tanks on both the left and right and nongovernmental watchdog groups. Even more surprising, criticism also came from the World Bank itself, especially senior vice president and chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.

While Stiglitz rarely mentioned the IMF by name, he very publicly attacked “the Washington consensus” that the IMF, backed by the United States Treasury Department, has tried to enforce around the world. The consensus is that poor countries that rely on IMF intervention are expected to adhere to a series of “structural adjustments” that are supposed to be implemented within three years. Those adjustments include balancing budgets (or run surpluses), cutting subsidies for food and other necessities, raising interest rates, privatizing as many functions as possible, reducing trade barriers, eliminating controls on foreign investment and focusing on increasing exports.

Stiglitz, a former Stanford professor who also served as chief of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors before taking the World Bank job, has argued that the IMF applies a one-size-fits-all solution in these countries without taking the country’s specific history and institutional development into account. What might work in the United States may not work in countries with much different political and economic cultures.

Stiglitz is particularly harsh on how the IMF acted in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. He called the reforms “an ideological, fundamental, root-and-branch approach to reform as opposed to an incremental, piecemeal, and adaptive approach.” He described the Western advisors — including the IMF — as “market Bolsheviks” who thought that simply because they had the right textbooks, they could instantaneously revolutionize society, much as the Bolsheviks in 1917. Also, “some economic cold-warriors seem to have seen themselves on a mission to level the ‘evil’ institutions of communism.” This approach — which elevated rapid privatization of state property above all other goals — halved Russia’s economic output in a decade, while China, pursuing a more incremental approach that emphasized competition more than privatization, doubled its output in the same period. While growth plummeted, inequality in Russia shot up, as the privileged few plundered the country, shipping capital out (through the Bank of New York, among other places) as the IMF was trickling money in.

“The failures of the reforms that were widely advocated go far deeper [than how the reforms were implemented in Russia] — to a misunderstanding of the very foundations of a market economy,” Stiglitz told a development economics conference last spring. “At least part of the problem was an excessive reliance on textbook models of economics.” Moreover, he said, “even the creation of a market economy should be viewed as a means to broader ends. It is not just the creation of a market economy that matters, but the improvement of living standards and the establishment of sustainable, equitable and democratic development.”

In Asia, Stiglitz blames much of the economic crisis on many countries’ decisions, strongly encouraged by the IMF and the United States, to open up their financial markets rapidly without proper regulation. Then partly because of shortcomings in the regulation of financial markets in such developed countries as Japan and the United States, too much short-term investment rushed in, then rushed out. The IMF demanded high interest rate, tight money policies, designed to lure those foreign investors back into Thailand, Indonesia and Korea. But those policies pushed fragile businesses into bankruptcy, wreaking havoc on what were flawed but still basically vibrant economies. Borrowers in these countries certainly made mistakes, Stiglitz said, but the lenders were just as much at fault. Moreover, the powerful rating agencies — like Moody’s — were doubly in error. Stiglitz argues that they failed to alert banks and investors to the increasingly risky financial condition of countries like Thailand, then after the crash turned around and exaggerated the risk of returning to those countries, simply to make themselves look less foolish.

“Many countries followed the dictums of liberalization, stabilization, and privatization, the central premises of the so-called Washington consensus, and still did not grow,” he told a United Nations conference late last year. Similarly most of the countries that have grown most successfully in the past quarter-century — in East Asia — rejected much of the Washington consensus, he noted.

Stiglitz has a different approach to economic development than many of the traditional macro-economist number crunchers. Development, he argues, involves the transformation of society, including such non-economic processes as improving the status of women, not just creation of pockets of wealth. Effective strategies to develop poor countries must have the support of the population and empower them. Imposing strict economic rules on countries, as the IMF does in its structural adjustment policies, “reinforces traditional hierarchical relationships” and creates a sense of impotence, Stiglitz claimed. People are more likely to accept and take part in reform “if there is a sense of equity, of fairness, about the development process,” Stiglitz said last year in Geneva. “By contrast,” he continued, taking a barely veiled shot at the IMF, “a decision to, say, eliminate food subsidies that is imposed from the outside, through an agreement between the ruling elite and an international agency, is not likely to be helpful in achieving a consensus — and thus in promoting a successful transformation.”

Occasionally, World Bank president James Wolfensohn either appears to rein in Stiglitz or distance himself slightly. (He recently referred to Stiglitz as a “free spirit.”) But most close observers think that the two men largely agree on broad outlines and that there is a real, if at times overstated, difference between the Bank and the IMF. The IMF defends its record but rarely attacks Stiglitz.

This is not the first time there has been tension: the IMF role has changed and greatly expanded since the 1970s and often encroached on the long-term development turf of the Bank. With their different histories, missions and constituencies within member governments, the two institutions should naturally disagree to some extent.

But over the past two decades the “Washington consensus” has prevailed and largely shut down debate, despite the hammering of citizen groups, environmentalists and advocates of the world’s poor against both the Bank and the IMF. Indeed, many of Stiglitz’s critiques also apply to the actual practices of the Bank. Despite its pledges to pay more attention to the poor, to the environment and to aspects of development other than growth, two-thirds of the Bank’s outstanding loans are in support of “structural adjustment” programs (though at times to cushion the harsh blows on the poor). Also, environmentalist and human rights groups are attacking two big Bank projects nearing final approval — a massive relocation of Chinese farmers into a fragile region designated an autonomous region for Tibetans and a huge oil pipeline from Chad through Cameroon that critics say will ravage rain forest and simply benefit corrupt elites in the two countries.

Experts say the increased debate may ultimately lead to a less monolithic approach to global economic reform. “The biggest significance [of the split between the IMF and the Bank] is the willingness of the Bank and Stiglitz to challenge the macroeconomic policies of the IMF,” observes Robert Naimann, a research associate at the Preamble Center, a progressive think tank in Washington. “They’ve been forced to debate, and that creates more space. It’s one thing when developing countries face the IMF alone, and people say there’s no alternative, and it’s another thing when there’s this wide open policy debate.”

Even Ian Vasquez, director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at the ultra-free market Cato Institute, agrees that Stiglitz’s arguments have been “constructive.” “It shows how when you give an institution like the IMF so much influence it monopolizes development views,” he said, “and I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Likewise, even though Andrea Durbin, director of international programs at Friends of the Earth, thinks that Stiglitz hasn’t incorporated environmental issues enough into his model, she sees Stiglitz as a “revolutionary” and “anomaly” within the global banking circles. “What’s refreshing about Joseph Stiglitz is he calls it like he sees it,” Durbin said, “even when his own institution is going the wrong way. And that’s unusual for a man in his position.”

As the IMF and World Bank meet, government finance ministers and bank officials will be discussing such issues as debt relief for poor countries and dealing with bankers mad about a recent IMF decision to permit Ecuador to default on some debts. The wider debate that Stiglitz has opened on the meaning of development, the constructive role of government, the limits of the market and the need for democratic transformation will be addressed tangentially, at best. But the record of car crashes and false starts on the road to global economic well-being suggests that the engineers of both economic engines and highways need to listen to Stiglitz and other critics of the “Washington consensus,” then start considering some fundamentally different designs.

In both plays, the dilemmas in confronting racism’s legacy lead to
personal as well as social tragedy. The juxtaposition of the two reveals how the master/slave dynamic has persisted long after slavery’s end. Gilman’s characters
struggle with race from a largely white perspective: How should they talk — and
how do they really feel — about blacks and other minorities? Is anything
correct about “political correctness”? What can they do to assuage
their guilt or help minorities? Wilson’s characters — all of them black — face the flip side of those issues: How can blacks maintain their dignity in a society that denigrates them and would prefer to ignore them, except when actively blocking their attempts to
make meaningful lives for themselves? What kinds of compromises are
acceptable, or necessary, with whites and the power elite? Is it
possible to maintain an African-American identity and community without
resources under African-American control? The common theme is that blacks and
whites alike are trapped by history — no confrontation with the legacy of racism has a
chance of success without addressing the continuing imbalance of power.

“Spinning Into Butter” takes place in the office of Dean Sarah Daniels, who is in her first year at a small Vermont college. It’s clear from the start that Daniels means well. She wants to provide a special minority scholarship to a deserving student. But when the chosen recipient edgily insists on being identified as “Nuyorican,” Daniels tries to
cajole him into being Puerto Rican for the sake of the forms
she must fill out. Later, when it’s reported that two racist notes had
been attached to the door of black student Simon Brick’s room, the white administrators, faculty and students all rush to advance their various self-serving agendas: They keep it quiet (to avoid bad public relations); call a campus-wide meeting (and write a lengthy paper analyzing and condemning racism); and form Students for Tolerance (to bolster chances of getting into law school). Nobody bothers to consult the minority students — and only Daniels suggests talking to Simon first.

As the campus crisis deepens, the other administrators demand that
Daniels come up with a concise, 10-point plan for battling racism on campus — one
that won’t require much money, but promises to have “great impact.” In a long night at the office, Daniels begins making a list, in parts cynical, whimsical and painfully ambivalent. “Stop being stupid,” is the first step on the not-terribly helpful agenda. “Admit defeat,” it concludes.

Daniels unleashes her tirade of confusion and despair to a horrified colleague. She wants to help minorities — she even studied African-American literature! Maybe nothing
works, she fears. Maybe she can’t transcend racism. Then the tone
shifts ominously: Maybe blacks can’t either. She reflects on her
experience at a black college, and living in Chicago. “In the
abstract” blacks were fine, she said, “but in reality they were so
rude.” Although the people who irritated her may have been a minority
within a minority, “the ones who were awful seemed exceptionally awful,
loud and belligerent and abusive … I know blacks have agency,” she
acknowledges, but thinks maybe they don’t succeed just because they’re “lazy
and stupid.”

After the FBI determines that Simon sent the notes to himself, he
is expelled by the other administrators, without so much as a phone
call to his parents. Daniels falls victim to the crisis as well.
There is as little effort to understand Simon’s actions as there was to
support him as a lonely and isolated student, but the cop who drives
him home observes afterwards to Daniels, “He wouldn’t have done that to
himself if somebody hadn’t done something to him.” Daniels notes that
Simon was like the storybook character of Little Black Sambo, getting
all the menacing tigers to chase each other around the tree,
ultimately “spinning into butter.”

Gilman argues that whites objectify blacks as the “other,” thus
failing to treat them as equals who might be worthy of respect. This
seems equally true whether her white characters have few encounters
with blacks (as with most of the Vermont academics) or many encounters (as
Daniels does). At one level, the play is a gibe at “political
correctness,” which is presented as often being a fraudulent cover for
deeper, unexamined racial prejudice, ignorance or distrust. The
anguished and self-important academics are easy comic targets,
especially with the campus cop playing salt-of-the-earth foil. Daniels
is portrayed as warm-hearted but pathetic as she apologetically
navigates the terrain of her own guilt, but despite her impolitic
outburst she has more compassion than her colleagues. The problem with
“political correctness,” however, seems less in the aspiration to
confront racism and more in the failure to take individuals seriously
in a world driven by bureaucratic categories and sociological
abstractions. In the end, the white administrators had the power not only to
define those categories and award aid, but also to summarily expel Simon
because he violated their terms for dealing with racism.

It is hard to argue with Daniels’ plea for frank, person-to-person
communication. Daniels’ long lament about “lazy and stupid” blacks
is a shocker on stage, coming from the middle-class academic. “Can’t
people admit they feel this way?” the dean asks. But to what end? If
such bluntness led to any meaningful dialogue on race, it might be
worthwhile, but it is more likely simply to legitimize the expression
of bigoted statements that have been thankfully dampened out of guilt,
shame or “political correctness.” These sentiments may mask real
feelings, but sometimes frankness or honesty can simply be an excuse
for sloppy thinking or crude prejudice.

The key issue is not so much objectification, political correctness or
some aspect of identity politics as it is who has power to define
social identities and relationships — white-controlled corporations,
media empires, universities and political organizations. Facing up to
objectification ultimately necessitates contending with powerlessness,
either submitting to it or struggling against it. That struggle with
powerlessness may lead as readily to personal pathologies, such as
Simon’s notes, as political movements, whether it’s Students for
Tolerance or the minority student organization. On the other hand, although
whites in “Spinning Into Butter” may agonize over how to deal with
blacks in their midst and what is the appropriate terminology and
conduct, they do not confront the fact that they still have
disproportionate power in the college and society, even with their ambiguous
power to “do good.”

The world of Wilson’s jitney drivers — operators of illegal but crucial taxis in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson grew up — is surrounded by whites, at times
penetrated by whites and always heavily influenced by whites, but
there are no white characters to the drama. Indeed, for all the
deleterious effects of the white-dominated power structure on the lives
of these men, one of them suggests that most whites don’t even know
they exist — just as the whites in “Spinning Into Butter” barely know
any black people.

Wilson, whose work ranks in the pantheon of American playwrights like Eugene
O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, once again brilliantly sketches memorable
characters and provides a realistic slice of black American life. As in other Wilson plays,
the drama of the African-American community is nearly self-contained here, but this world exists within a society that can — and does — reach out and destroy both black
individuals and communities. Whatever the complications that the white
administrators in Gilman’s Vermont college have in dealing with blacks,
they pale by comparison with the dilemmas faced by blacks dealing with the whites
who hold so much power over their lives.

Becker, a retired steel-mill worker, runs a jitney station, serving
the unofficial taxi needs of the black community. The jitney drivers
themselves are a rich collection of troubled but hard-working men who
transcend their easy identifications — an angry young man who is frustrated, but
trying to be a successful husband and father; an amiable drunk with
memories of being a tailor to black stars; a gruff gossip; a player with a
sentimental streak; a philosopher of self-improvement. Life at the
jitney station is a series of constant hustles, negotiations over small
change, limited opportunities and bigger, often faded dreams. The “car
service” offers the men a living and a sense of independence that is
threatened by the city’s plans to tear down everything on the street in
the name of urban renewal.

Yet Becker, who provides the initiative and order for the jitney
station, faces a more personal crisis. His son, Booster, is about to
leave prison after serving 20 years for murdering his well-to-do white girlfriend.

Booster’s act ultimately kills his mother and his relationship with his
father as well. Becker is bitter that his son, a good student who had
started college, threw away a promising career, but Booster had seen
his father’s lifetime of hard work and submissiveness to white
landlords and bosses as making him “small.”

Betrayed by his girlfriend, and caught in the web of her father’s deeply
hypocritical views of sex and race, Booster had thought that by seeking revenge he could redeem his father and make the Becker family name “big” again — as his father appeared to the young boy
within the confines of the black community.

Father and son never reconcile, but they indirectly attempt to redeem
themselves to each other. Becker decides to organize the jitney
drivers and fight urban renewal. “We can keep playing by their rules as
we have been,” Becker says. “But they change the rules. We’ve got to do
something else.” Yet Becker never gets to try his new strategy, falling victim to his rigorously responsible work ethic. As the dispirited drivers praise his father, Booster reflects that all he ever knew about his father was how hard he worked, and for the first time contemplates stepping into his empty shoes.

One of the beauties of Wilson’s plays is the economical way in which he presents complex characters as believable but imperfect human beings. They are
characters as universally human as those in any great drama, yet deeply
rooted in African-American culture and history — as much black Americans
as Ibsen’s characters are Scandinavian or Moliere’s French. They are
trying to live out their dreams — of family, happiness,
livelihood, sexual fulfillment and personal pride — but within a
context that limits and intrudes upon their actions. The city’s elite
can condemn their neighborhood and destroy their business. Landlords
threaten the roof over their heads and the stature of parents in
the eyes of their children. Whites control access to good jobs. Even when blacks
succeed in school, when they reach out and make personal connections to
whites, they face betrayal. But while “Jitney” does offer some understanding of Booster’s
rage, the play is clearly unsympathetic to his actions, which destroyed him and his
family and did nothing to right any wrongs. Implicitly, it argues that
the solution is rather for blacks to work together politically and to
create their own base of economic and cultural power.

Quite rightly, neither “Spinning Into Butter” nor “Jitney” attempts to
provide full-blown political analysis, let alone a 10-bullet
program of action for eliminating racism. Both Wilson and Gilman have made serious
efforts to provide realistic portrayals of how the conundrum of race plays out in American
life. In their hands, the tragic flaw in American life becomes the
stuff of great drama.

Yet even as pundits were cheering the earlier stock run-up and forecasts of as much as 7.5 percent growth for this year, strikes since late April at subways, hospitals, auto plants, television networks and many other workplaces tell a different story.

The strikers, like many Korean workers, fear that whatever recovery is under way will not benefit them soon enough, and that they may still face more job insecurity or layoffs as the government — under pressure from the IMF and international money managers — pushes Korea’s big, diverse corporate conglomerates to reorganize and trim their payrolls. More fundamentally, many believe the system that lifted Korea from abject poverty into the club of rich nations in a few decades needs drastic change, and they want ordinary Koreans like themselves to have a voice in deciding the country’s direction.

Virtually nobody in the country wants to preserve the old Korean model intact. Whatever its economic successes, it was also undemocratic, repressive and corrupt. But there are strikingly different ideas about reform in Korea. Some government officials are pushing modest changes toward a Japanese-style system that would preserve strategic relationships among the groups of companies known as chaebol and government. Big business, of course, favors greater deregulation of the conglomerates.

Among advocates of more thorough change, the debate is between the American model of free market fundamentalism (pushed by the IMF, Washington and global financiers) and a more democratic model drawing on experiences ranging from European social democracy to American employee stock ownership plans (favored by unions and most of the citizen democracy movement).

The choices Koreans make in the next few years will not only shape their country’s future but could have a ripple effect throughout Asia, including China, since Korea’s success has been a touchstone for government policies in many other countries.

It has been far too easy for many Americans to see the Asia crisis as proof that the “Asian model” of developmental capitalism has failed and that the only alternative is to become like America as fast as possible. Despite the ubiquitous Kentucky Fried Chicken and other American fast food signs in downtown Seoul, the average Korean does not want an American-style, individualistic, winner-take-all society. Korea has rushed to prosperity with a more collective strategy, and there is still a strong sense of both familial and social responsibility for others.

The Korean model was flawed, of course, mainly because it was so undemocratic. The country’s great leap forward since the 1960s came as a result of the government, always under heavy military influence, holding down workers while channeling loans (often at negative interest rates) to the chaebol, big, family-controlled, cross-subsidizing conglomerates of disparate industries. The chaebol, like Hyundai, Daewoo, Samsung and Lucky-Goldstar (now LG), were expected to develop modern industries — especially steel, auto, machine tools, chemicals, shipbuilding and electronics — that could meet and beat Japanese, American and European firms in the world market. The new corporate oligarchies in turn pumped millions of dollars back to the bank accounts of political and military leaders. With the always tense relations with the North ready as a rationale, they suppressed human rights, democracy and workers, whose low wages gave Korean chaebol an edge.

New worker protests against harsh conditions swelled the democracy movement in the 1970s, then exploded in 1987 with a wave of strikes and organizing. As unions finally won a share of prosperity for workers, many light manufacturers — like contractors for American sport shoe companies — fled to lower-wage Indonesia, Vietnam and China. Korea was succeeding in its drive for world prominence in advanced, heavy manufacturing, but the chaebol were also running up huge debts.

Meanwhile, the government — essentially in the hands of the military after a 1979 coup — had been losing legitimacy, and the democracy movement was gaining strength. In 1992 longtime oppositionist Kim Young Sam was elected president by compromising his democratic principles, but he also surprised many Koreans and foreign observers by bringing his two predecessors to trial for their coup and corruption. He also opened Korea more to global capital, which rushed in, then rushed out in 1997 as the Asian crisis unfolded and as global overcapacity and weak prices weakened some chaebol and their Korean bankers.

By insisting on high interest rates and new government austerity as a condition for a financial assistance, the International Monetary Fund plunged the Korean economy further into recession. While the IMF insisted on reform of the chaebol, the main victims were employees of small and medium-sized businesses, which couldn’t get credit and lost domestic markets.

The IMF crisis hit just as Korean presidential elections were under way in late 1997. Kim Dae Jung, a veteran democracy movement leader who was jailed and nearly killed by earlier governments, initially hinted at opposing IMF conditions, then backed off. While his victory at the time seemed a culmination of decades of campaigning for democracy, even many of his supporters have already grown deeply disillusioned. Park In Sang, president of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), the more moderate of two labor federations, had endorsed Kim. Despite his disappointment with him, however, he worries for the future of democracy in Korea if Kim fails. Yet other erstwhile sympathizers think Kim has abandoned his principles too much to justify even defensive support. “Democratization is gone,” lamented Kim Min-Young, chief coordinator for People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a major citizen group. “It’s all over.”

In the eyes of his critics, President Kim has become a captive of the IMF, international money managers and the inherited government bureaucracy. Kim has made a few friendly gestures toward labor and citizen groups, most notably by including both the FKTU and the more radical breakaway labor federation, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), in a Tripartite Commission with business and government to respond to the crisis and reform the economy. He also expanded slightly the country’s still very modest social safety net as official unemployment jumped to more than 8 percent (the unions say it’s more than 20 percent). As unemployment more than tripled normal levels, even workers with jobs faced deep pay and benefit cuts, longer work hours and new insecurity (now half of all Korean workers are classified as “temporary”). Employees at small companies, especially women workers, have been hit hardest.

Since then the KCTU and the FKTU withdrew from the Tripartite Commission, arguing that the government was still pushing anti-labor proposals and failing to secure meaningful concessions from the chaebol. Citizen groups are equally unhappy. For months the plaza and streets in front of Myongdong Cathedral, the refuge of anti-government protestors since the 1970s, have been filled with human rights demonstrators, hunger strikers, angry unionists, university students and other critics. Although Kim has released some longtime political prisoners and tried to open a dialogue with the unpredictable government in the North, human rights organizations condemned his proposed rights commission as weak and lacking independence.

Other groups are pressing for increased shareholder rights to challenge the dominance of the chaebol by their founding families. While there is still deep anger at the IMF, which is being sued by bank workers for turning a short-term chaebol problem into a national catastrophe, there is also widespread anger at the chaebol as the source of Korea’s problems. “We never borrowed a single dollar,” said Rhee Chol Soon, director of the Korean Women Workers Association. “Who did? Big chaebol. And now we have to pay it back. If they keep asking for these things [such as austerity for workers], one day society will explode.” Chaebol owners had hoped that recovery would spare them from reform, but now the Daewoo crisis will give reformers of all stripes new ammunition.

Citizen and labor groups share with the IMF and global money managers a desire to make the secretive chaebol more open, more professionally managed and less pampered with special deals from government, but unlike narrow free-market enthusiasts, they want business to be more accountable to its workers and Korean society, not just to capital markets. Some reformers would preserve the close relationships among businesses and banks that have been a hallmark of Asian “relationship capitalism” but make the relationships somewhat more transparent and formal, as with the Japanese keiretsu. But others, like the KCTU, want to break up the chaebol into independent businesses.

Even unions endorse more accountability to shareholders as a way of thwarting “chaebol tyranny,” though many observers have noted that Korea’s corporatist deal between chaebol and the state has permitted business to take a long view and not be subjected to American-style short-term pressures of flighty investors. Unions and citizen groups, however, are most interested in increasing the voice that workers have in corporate decision-making, either through worker ownership, stronger bargaining power or a kind of co-determination with management (in the manner of Germany and other European countries).

In the near term, labor and citizen groups want to prevent further layoffs. They want to reduce the standard work week from 44 to 40 hours, with no reduction in pay, in order to create jobs, stimulate the domestic economy and increase workers’ leisure. After a late summer slowdown in strike activity, demands for shortening the work week are likely to accelerate. “We can accept some level of job reduction,” said Yoon Young-Mo, international secretary of the KCTU, “but it can only be legitimized if there is a general change in the ownership structure and the management of the chaebol. If the same people are in charge with monopoly and autocratic control while shedding jobs, that’s not acceptable.”

Last month, Kim pledged to union leaders that he would support their demand for full participation in corporate restructuring decisions. A crisis erupted in June when, in a drunken moment of candor, one of his ministers admitted that the government had instigated a strike at a state-run mint and printing enterprise late last year in order to crush the union and demonstrate its anti-labor bona fides. Kim agreed to release the jailed unionists and to stop the longstanding practice of addressing major strikes through the state national security commission (which has heavy representation from the police, army, Korean CIA and prosecutors).

If the movement that brought Korea out of the old repressive era can succeed in bringing more democracy to government and the workplace, then a much more potent and appealing alternative Asian model of advanced capitalism could emerge on the Korean peninsula. The crisis of the past two years has sharpened the conflict over Korea’s future. Whatever the repercussions of Daewoo’s near-bankruptcy, neither a renewed crisis nor economic recovery is likely to suppress the fundamental debate now under way.

This carefully crafted fagade, however, is beginning to show cracks. As the House geared up to impeach President Clinton last fall under Hyde’s leadership, the pious Roman Catholic defender of family values and stern opponent of abortion was embarrassed by Salon’s exposure of his lengthy affair with a much younger woman while he was married and serving in the Illinois Legislature. When Hyde stridently pressed the impeachment case in the Senate, despite overwhelming public sentiment against removing the president, he appeared more right-wing sectarian scold than righteously sententious Solon.

Now two journalists are hoping to widen those cracks. In “Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe: Where More Than Time and Space are Warped” (Common Courage), Dennis Bernstein and Leslie Kean offer a catalog of Hydean hypocrisy, painting a canvas of Hyde’s record that is broader than most people know — and not one bit flattering. They provide some fascinating new details to expand on Salon’s account, based on the first lengthy interview with Hyde’s lover. They show the man who pleaded that “lying must have consequences” defending lying by his friend and hero from the Iran-Contra scandal, Oliver North, even when it involved North’s deceiving Congress and the American people about illegal executive branch actions. The fervent defender of “the rule of law” when it came to Clintonian evasions about sex was willing to take the stand to defend lawbreaking by another Hyde hero, extremist anti-abortion leader Joseph Scheidler.

This is not a full-fledged biography, but vigorous political pamphleteering from a leftist perspective. Rushed to print in three months (without enough care by the publisher to catch many annoying typos), it includes some new revelations, but it is valuable mainly for pulling together tawdry aspects of Hyde’s record, many of which may be little known even if previously reported.

The most serious charge against Hyde, which Bernstein and Kean ably summarize and bring up to date, concerns his role in the costly failure of an Illinois savings and loan of which Hyde was a member of the board of directors. Hyde’s S&L debacle led to federal investigations and lawsuits, and even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune last fall called for an investigation of how Hyde managed to avoid any legal or financial consequences for the S&L’s spectacular failure.

The gist of the S&L story is this: In 1981, after stepping down from the House Banking Committee, Hyde went on the board of directors of Clyde Federal Savings and Loan, whose chairman was one of Hyde’s many banking industry political contributors. Congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in 1982, and Clyde began dealing in risky financial options, participating in loans for luxury condos in Texas and buying certificates of deposit from a bank in the Cayman Islands, a financial center notorious for money laundering. Hyde was not only aware of such deals but often made or seconded motions on the board to pursue them. By 1984, when Hyde left the board, it was clear to the directors from reports they received that the institution was failing, but Hyde and others on the board continued to abuse their positions, giving improper financial rewards to insiders and even allowing the institution to overcharge the government on servicing student loans.

In 1990, the party came to an end. The federal government put Clyde into receivership, and ultimately paid out $67 million to cover insured deposits — more than the cost of bailing out Madison Guaranty, the thrift at the heart of Kenneth Starr’s abortive Whitewater investigation. The Resolution Trust Corp. sued Hyde and other directors for $17.2 million in 1993. Four years later, without reaching the stage of full-scale pretrial investigation and taking of depositions, the government settled with the defendants for only $850,000 and made a special settlement exempting Hyde from paying anything.

Hyde, the only member of Congress sued for “gross negligence” in the failure of a savings and loan, was not cleared, as he has claimed. Rather, there’s good reason to believe he used his political clout and refusal to settle as a way to escape payment and give the illusion that he was exonerated. Indeed, the presence of Hyde and two other prominent Republican members of Congress on the boards of Illinois savings and loans may have deterred serious investigation of the strategically important role in the national crisis played by the Illinois thrift industry, which worked in conjunction with the politically powerful industry lobbying group, the U.S. League of Savings Institutions, which was based in Chicago.

Though the lawsuit is now closed, the ethical questions about Hyde’s behavior — including the fundamental conflict of interest of a member of Congress sitting on the board of a federally regulated financial institution — remain open. So should the question of how he was granted such a special deal. Hyde has avoided scrutiny of his role at Clyde. He has rarely agreed to discuss it, and then always tried to portray his involvement as inconsequential. To the end he claimed to be an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors. But the record on the case, which Bernstein ably pulls together, shows Hyde as a central player and as determined to conceal his role.

Last fall, for instance, the Tribune revealed that a private detective, who said he was working for Hyde, was paid to spy on Tim Anderson, a former bank consultant who has doggedly, at great personal expense, tried to expose the shenanigans in the Illinois savings and loans and insist that Hyde be held responsible for his deeds. Hyde, who had just demanded that Clinton reveal whether Clinton had hired any private investigators to look into people involved in his scandal, at first denied any involvement with the sleuth, Ernie Rizzo, who posed as a TV journalist in order to get information on Anderson. Hyde admitted receiving reports on Anderson’s activities, but said they were provided by a mutual friend whose name he could not recall.

When faced with possible ethics charges for failing to report the gift of these investigative services, Hyde remembered the friend’s name: It was his personal attorney, who claimed to have paid Rizzo $2,000, not the $10,000 that Rizzo indicated would have been his normal fee. When a Chicago radio talk-show host tried to have Rizzo on her program, Rizzo received a call from a politically powerful local attorney who said he was representing Hyde. The attorney told Rizzo to stop talking or he’d “never work again.” Hyde has still not made available a canceled check proving who paid Rizzo and how much, despite repeated requests.

The evidence of Hyde’s central role in the Clyde failure and of his willingness to go to extreme lengths to avoid personal responsibility for his actions has been clear for years. Bernstein and Kean lay it out well. They raise the question: How has Hyde managed to escape a scandal that would have brought down most politicians long ago?

First, many Democrats were implicated in some part of the S&L crisis and simply wanted to keep it under the rug. Also, some reporters and editors probably saw savings and loan stories as too complex or, by the mid-’90s, too far in the past, to keep readers’ attention. More important, I think, many reporters and editors were deterred by the image that Hyde, with help from the media, had concocted, of an honest and honorable politician. Fear of retribution may have discouraged others.

Finally, some Democrats in Congress have seen Hyde as unbeatable politically, no worse than the next Republican likely to come from that district and someone they could at least occasionally deal with. And with the exception of the Government Accountability Project, few liberal organizations have understood how they could use Hyde’s fiduciary failings to weaken one of their leading foes. If liberal Democrats and citizen groups with their own beef against the congressman had listened to Hyde nemesis Tim Anderson, rather than dismissing him as an irritating and overzealous nag, they might have nailed Hyde a long time ago and spared the world both some hypocrisy and some flawed policies.

Bernstein and Kean, respectively the principal and associate hosts/producers of “Flashpoints,” a daily radio news show on the Pacifica Network’s KPFA station in Berkeley, Calif., began developing an interest in Hyde last summer. Bernstein had reported extensively on the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s and had even produced a deck of trading cards about leading S&L swindlers. In the course of his work, Bernstein had run across Anderson, and made mental note of his material about Hyde. “When Henry Hyde surfaced as the moral arbiter of impeachment,” Bernstein said, “I put Anderson on the air to talk about Clyde and the role Hyde may have played. After I got done, my phones went wild.”

When KPFA offered an essay by Anderson and membership in the newly minted “Hyde 100 Club” as a premium for donating to the listener-supported radio station, the response required changing its name to the Hyde 200. Then came Salon’s revelation of Hyde’s moral hypocrisy, which heightened the public’s curiosity about a man best known for the “Hyde amendment” to block federal money to give poor women access to abortion. When news broke last fall about Rizzo’s investigation of Anderson, the authors figured Hyde had more to hide. “That was the inspiration for going further with the book,” Bernstein said. “When Hyde set himself up as moral arbiter in impeachment, he needed to stand up to scrutiny of his own career.”

So Bernstein and Kean combed the Hyde record for signs of hypocrisy, extremism and improprieties. It may come as a surprise, but they dig up even more about Hyde’s long affair with beautician Cherie Snodgrass, now Cherie Hancock, and it makes for some of the book’s best reading. Kean managed to persuade the media-shy Hancock, Hyde’s lover in the 1960s, to agree to lengthy interviews. The story Hancock now tells is different in some details from the description that her former husband, Fred Snodgrass, gave to Salon. More important, it is dramatically at odds with Hyde’s description of the affair as a “youthful indiscretion,” and with his contention that the affair ended when Hancock’s husband confronted Hyde’s wife with news of her husband’s betrayal.

First, Hyde was hardly youthful. He was 45 when the affair ended, and indiscretion hardly describes the long-term relationship Hancock recalls (with significant points confirmed by family and friends). “Cherie Hancock describes an eight-year, intensely romantic and serious relationship with Henry Hyde in which the two were very much in love,” Kean wrote. “‘ I adored him,’ she says. ‘We showered each other with love.’”

Hancock was separated from her husband at the start of the affair in 1961 and divorced two years later. She claims that for the first six years she had no idea Hyde was married, though he had “a reputation as a womanizer,” and was having an affair with his secretary just prior to his relationship with Hancock. She ignored the advice of Hyde’s partner to stay away from him because “he’s trouble.” But for Hancock “it was like coming out of a dungeon into a bright field full of flowers when I met him.” Hyde met Hancock’s family and joined them on vacation trips. He took her to very public events, from bars and restaurants to political rallies and trips to Springfield, the state capital. He called her “my heathen,” because she wasn’t as pious as he was, and at parties would jokingly pray, “Dear God, make me pure, but not now, later.”

And then, six years into their affair, Hancock’s ex-husband, Fred Snodgrass, told Hyde’s wife that she could find Cherie and Hank together at a Springfield hotel. Jeanne Hyde, who is now dead, called the hotel where Hyde had told her he was staying, but he wasn’t even registered there. Hyde eventually arrived at Hancock’s hotel room with the news that his wife and Cherie’s ex-husband had talked. It was the first Hancock knew that he was married. The ride back to Chicago was painful, but Hyde and Hancock were soon back together again as a couple. The affair continued for another two years before a “very serious” — but still private — issue led to their breaking up.

Now 63 and living in Texas, Hancock still speaks fondly of the “Hank” she loved, but she is very bitter about Henry Hyde, the congressman. She’s angry about his “lying to the public” regarding their affair and its duration, the “insult” of calling such a substantial relationship an “indiscretion” and his statement — “for show” — that his marriage remained intact despite the affair. Recalling a side of Hyde that showed “intolerance towards people of a different ilk” and “double standards for men and women,” she said she was “extremely shocked and disgusted” by Hyde’s attempts as a congressman to ban abortions for poor women. “I don’t hate him,” she told Kean. “I hate what he wants to do to the people of the United States. I hate the dark murky side of him where he wants people to live as he sees fit. He’s being so moralistic when he was just the opposite.”

And indeed, it is Hyde’s hypocrisy that draws most of Bernstein and Kean’s ire. They focus on Hyde’s attack on women’s right to an abortion (including support of some of the most militant factions of the anti-abortion movement), in light of his womanizing; his support for the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan era, including lying, in light of his vigorous prosecution of Clinton for much less nationally important lies; and his misrepresentation of his own sexual affair, even as he was trying to oust Clinton for lying about sex.

Hyde has no corner on political hypocrisy, of course, nor does hypocrisy adequately account for his public or private behavior and beliefs. Despite the book’s title, “Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe” does not fully map the congressman’s constellation of values. Although they tried — and failed — to interview Hyde, there is little here that explains what makes the man tick. Bernstein said that he sees Hyde as “a man who loves power and knows how to use it … His history shows he doesn’t really respect the rule of law. He’s a man who really believes he’s above the law.” One doesn’t have to sympathize with Hyde, however, to want to better understand both him and the people who support him.

While Hyde supporters might wince at some of his behavior, some probably would not share Bernstein and Kean’s sense of hypocritical contradiction. Ultimately, Bernstein and Kean see Hyde’s moral universe as “warped” partly because of the views he holds — favoring the death penalty, opposing abortion, supporting the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s. They energetically make their case against Hyde’s views, for example, reminding readers of the wave of terror unleashed by the Contras in Nicaragua and raising once again the heated issue of links between the crack epidemic and actions of the Contras, the CIA and, indirectly, Henry Hyde. They brush away Hyde’s claim to be a political moderate and portray him on most issues as a far right-winger, “a genuine bomb thrower in private,” according to Reagan’s National Security Council director, Robert McFarlane, who said Hyde argued for channeling private money through the Nicaraguan Catholic church to support the Contras.

If Hyde had been less slickly misleading about what he believed and who he was, Bernstein and Kean might have found him unbearably right-wing but less offensive. But they also abhor what they see as his phony sanctimony and his willingness to lie and deceive. For example, they argue that Hyde was a key figure in promoting the blatantly false and misleading “Birmingham memo” in 1987 to conceal the involvement of the Contras with drug trafficking. They also have contempt for his contradictions. For example, despite his claim to defend the rule of law and the Constitution and his role as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Hyde was instrumental in pushing through the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The act greatly limits the ability of people sentenced to death under state law to obtain federal court review of their convictions, thus undermining the right of habeas corpus enshrined in the Constitution. It’s particularly galling because Hyde’s home state has been forced thus far to acknowledge the innocence of 12 men sentenced to die, including one who last fall came within hours of execution.

Hyde’s impeachment role provoked the book, but Bernstein and Kean are not Clinton defenders. It is striking how many of the actions for which they criticize Hyde, such as Internet speech restrictions, permanent implementation of the Hyde amendment and the Effective Death Penalty Act, all came into law because Clinton signed the legislation. From either his left or his right, Clinton often looks like a hypocrite. But Hyde’s contradictions stood out even in such company. “It wasn’t just that he was a corrupt politician,” Bernstein argued, “but a corrupt politician who was going to bring down the president in a sex scandal after a lifetime of affairs. He’s a guy in a huge glass house willing to throw boulders at someone also living in a glass house.”

What should anyone make of this small book’s indictment of Hyde? However politically damaging it may be, it isn’t against the law to be a hypocrite or even to make false statements about an old affair. From a citizen’s standpoint, the most relevant critique focuses on the substance of Hyde’s politics, not his deceptive posturing. From a legal standpoint, the Clyde affair is the most serious charge. All this might have crippled another politician, but Hyde has so far managed to hold the press at bay with a smile and the appearance of thoughtfulness, and his ideological opponents have failed to seriously confront him over the years. The result, as Bernstein and Kean argue, has been not only hypocrisy, but a persistent abuse of power that has led to the loss of lives and freedoms both at home and abroad. That’s more serious than a youthful indiscretion, but sadly, it won’t get the same attention.